Next weekend, I'll have a diary on the conservative welfare state as a common factor uniting conservatives, Blue Dogs and New Dems against progressives. Consider this an appetizer, appropriate to the day ahead.
Last Friday, just on the eve of Superbowl weekend, the issue of a possible lockout of players in the 2011 season erupted to throw a discordant note into mix. Although NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell tried to downplay the possibility, even the WaPo noticed that things weren't right, reporting that:
On the players' side, Tennessee Titans center Kevin Mawae, the president of the union, told a Congressional subcommittee during a hearing last month on Capitol Hill that the players are fully anticipating being locked out by the owners in 2011. DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the union, said Thursday that the owners had taken a series of steps that appeared designed to lock out the players.
Asked during his annual news conference Thursday about the prospects of a lockout in 2011, Smith called the urgency of the situation a 14 on a scale of 1 to 10.
The owners want massive give-backs from the players, because they claim to be losing money--which would not be surprising, since according to David Cay Johnston, author of Free Lunch, NONE of the big four subsidized monopoly sports leagues makes more money than it receives in public subsidies.
Below is a clip from Johsnton talking about this on Democracy Nowjust over a year ago. Although he focused almost exclusively on baseball in the clip--with a special little section on GW Bush & how local taxpayers made him rich--he did have this to say, more broadly:
Now, in this country right now, we are spending $2 billion a year subsidizing the big four sports: baseball, basketball, football and hockey. It accounts for all of the profits of that industry and more. Now, there may be individual teams that make money, but the industry as a whole is not profitable. And that's astonishing because the big four leagues are exempt from the laws of competition. By the way, irony is not dead, because here are people who are in the business of competition on the field who are exempted by law from the rules of economic competition.
If you go to England and you want to start a soccer team, they have to let you join the soccer league. There are thirteen commercial soccer teams in the London area. New York City, the biggest city in the country, there are two baseball teams, because there's no free entry into the market. In Los Angeles, there's no football team. And the owners use this power to prevent others from owning teams, to prevent municipal governments from owning teams, to prevent nonprofits from owning teams, to extract money from the taxpayers to build them new stadiums.
That's the conservative welfare state in action.
Sports stadiums in general are economic losers, and as for the Superbowl itself, it's not nearly as lucrative as the NFL claims, according to the folks at McCaltchy, the same outfit that wasn't snookered by Bush/Cheney on the whole Iraq War caper:
